A private art collection of mysterious origins is possibly worth $2 billion — and will eventually go to Vladimir Putin

Putin
touring the Guggenheim Museum in 2005. This painting is unrelated
to the collection mentioned in the article.Reuters/ITAR-TASS/Presidential Press
Service

In central Moscow there is a private art collection of
mysterious origins guarded by an octogenarian, Nina Moleva, who
says it's filled with original works by Leonardo da Vinci,
Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and other Renaissance
masters, according to a report by Layli Foroudi
in the Moscow Times.

And ultimately, this collection will go to none other than
Putin, per Moleva's wishes.

Moleva maintains that a Paris-based auction house valued
this collection with a starting price of $400 million and an
estimated real value of $2 billion after the dissolution of
the Soviet Union.

However, there are questions regarding how exactly the
octogenarian got this collection, whether it's actually
worth $2 billion, and whether these are even original works,
according to Foroudi.

Moleva and her late husband, Ely Belyutin, have said that
the collection comes from Belyutin's grandfather, Ivan Grinyov, a
stage artist in imperial Moscow.

He allegedly collected the works at European auctions, and then,
once the Revolution rolled around, hid them in a fake attic so
that Bolsheviks would not confiscate them. Four decades later,
when Moleva and Belyutin moved into the place, they said they
found the treasure.

All of this sounds kind of plausible — except that
another journalist, Alla Shevelkina, found no evidence
of an "Ivan Grinyov" in the imperial theater
archives.

"Another theory for the mysterious collection’s origins is
that Belyutin, who is rumored to have worked as a Soviet military
intelligence officer, acquired the art during World War II when a
lot of trophy art was brought back from defeated Germany,"
writes Foroudi.

Russian
President Vladimir Putin listens to explanations from an
unidentified Louvre museum official as they pause next to the
statue of Nike. (Also unrelated to the collection mentioned in
the article.)Reuters

However, regardless of how the couple got the
art, there's reason to doubt that it's actually worth what Moleva
says it is worth.

Parisian painting expert Eric Turquin, who visited the
collection with a professional from the Paris-based auction
house, told Foroudi that he
did not estimate the collection at $400 million, and he'd never
heard the Grinyov story — but added that "it was an
altogether remarkable body of religious paintings from the 16th
and 17th centuries."

In sum, the only thing that's certain about this collection
is that it is going to Vladimir Putin.

And "until recently, two policemen sat in a car 24 hours a day,
seven days a week by the entrance," of Moleva's apartment, writes
Foroudi. "A state official confirms [that the
police] are there to protect the collection."